Barzun tapped as US ambassador to Britain
Haass to lead new Belfast talks
WASHINGTON, July 10, (AP): President Barack Obama has picked the finance chairman for his 2012 re-election campaign to be the US ambassador to Britain, the White House said Tuesday.
Matthew Barzun, a business executive, has been confirmed by the Senate once before. He served as US ambassador to Sweden until 2011, when he took the position as Obama’s finance chairman. If confirmed for the London post, Barzun would replace Ambassador Louis Susman, another Democratic fundraiser, who stepped down earlier this year.
Obama is also nominating John Phillips, who raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for Obama’s 2012 campaign, to be the US envoy to Italy and the Republic of San Marino, the White House said. His wife, Linda Douglass, is a former White House official and served as a spokeswoman for Obama’s first campaign. An attorney known for representing whistle-blowers, Phillips currently chairs Obama’s commission that selects candidates to be White House Fellows.
Barzun and Phillips become the latest in a long string of Obama fundraisers and former campaign operatives to be given plum diplomatic postings in recent months — many of them in European capitals. Last month Obama tapped Patrick Gaspard, a former White House aide and top Democratic Party official, to be the US ambassador to South Africa. Earlier in June he nominated Rufus Gifford, who raised upward of $700 million as the head of Obama’s 2012 finance operation, to be US ambassador to Denmark. Obama also chose major fundraisers for postings in Spain and Germany.
John Hoover, a veteran diplomat who served in Africa, Asia and Europe, is Obama’s pick for Sierra Leone.
Meanwhile, an American diplomat with hands-on experience of the Northern Ireland conflict will oversee a new round of Belfast talks aimed at tackling the most entrenched issues still dividing Irish Catholics and British Protestants, the territory’s unity government announced Tuesday.
Richard Haass, who was President George W. Bush’s envoy to Northern Ireland in 2001-03, has been appointed to lead multiparty talks aimed at brokering compromises on a long list of deadlocks that proved too difficult for the Good Friday peace agreement of 1998.
Agreement this time also looks like a tall order. Points of dispute include Catholic opposition to Protestant marches, the most fundamental trigger point for Northern Ireland violence; the contested rights of both sides to fly their preferred British and Irish flags, an argument that sparked Protestant street blockades and clashes with police throughout December and January; and the question of how to honor and bring justice for the 3,700 dead from a nearly 45-year-old conflict.